This is worse than winter

The weather around the general Pacific area has been shocking – I’m sure I don’t need to delve into all the lows, earthquakes, tsunamis and whatnots… so “summer hockey” last night (and undoubtedly tomorrow night also) was atrociously freezing and wet.

I haven’t been studying much these holidays, but last Friday night my friend’s band, the Artisan Guns finally released their first EP through EMI, Bird & Bone. It’s amazing. I was so excited to have bought it in a store as well, and I’m sure the novelty is far greater for them than it is for me. Sadly, my favourite track (Tuesday Night) isn’t on their myspace page… but their EP Release gig blew the audience away. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to put pics of them up yet, but I’m finally uploaded photos of other friends of mine, who were their supporting act, the Glass Owls. Photos can be found here, or through Gallery -> Summer Boys.

I don’t usually get very good shots of drummers, cos they tend to be right at the back of very dark stages, but the photos from Friday were my best yet, even if I say so myself. I’ve just gotten back from Metronomy’s concert, and it’s 2.33am, so blogging is probably the last thing I ought to be doing right now… but I just felt like putting some photos up. Right now, my jacket is still grossly damp from me having been stuck in it in the front row, dancing and clicking away. Urgh.

On the sly

I’ve been feeling increasingly down, frustrated stressed out as of late, and in general I don’t have all that much to say right now. The only thing which has occurred that might have some long-term bearing on my life is that I’m already officially accepted into the LLB/BA conjoint degrees at university next year based on my UCAS points. Music and Bmus/BA, however, still says “Pending”… we shall see how that develops after I actually send in my music application, I suppose.

The other day during last period study class, I was much too tired to attempt any more writing and sat around daydreaming instead. I was thinking that I really don’t like the feeling I get when I get asked if my hair is naturally curly. At this point I should explain that my hair is naturally quite wavy – though not enough to be curly, and too much of a mess to be anywhere near straight, so about a year ago I got talked into getting a perm; which has surprisingly lasted a whole year until about now. In other words, I decided that being in-between sucked so chose to incline towards something which I thought looked better than the other (I look awful with proper, straight hair).  But being asked such a question makes me feel somewhat like a fraud. Frankly, I observe other people’s roots for answers, instead of asking them “oh, is your hair actually naturally blonde?” – surely not! It would be social suicide in the land of females, so I’m not quite acquainted with why it’s okay for me to be confronted with “oh I thought so, that it wasn’t naturally that curly”: as if I was fake by further extents than those evidently-bleached-platinum-blondes with skin several shades of unkempt and uneven orange, their lips dripping with gloss.

That said, I don’t have any problem with people dying their hair blonde – except asians, really. Now that is just not meant to be. Gross.

A beach, a tournament and music nationals

I’m not sure exactly what happened to my blog in the week/ends that I was away in Rotorua, but somehow it has nicely resurrected itself upon my return. A blow-by-blow (sorry, couldn’t resist, I copped too many hits to the hand, arms and legs with endless blood and skin loss to not use that term) account of tournament is just far beyond me right now, and to be frank, coming 14th isn’t too exciting. Although, I’m proud to say we only lost to the team who won the Marie Fry cup by 3-1.

The first set of photos are from the Friday night before I left – Angie and I went with our geeky boys to see District 9 – and I have to admit, after having seen the first 20minutes at a friends house on a pirated file, I couldn’t take the first half of the movie seriously. But then it got darker, deeper, and I was almost reduced to curling in my seat. The real fun only began when most of us parted ways, but Freddy, William, Joel and I were adamant that we weren’t going to return home without getting up so some form of shenanigans. It started off with us lying in the middle of Joel’s street. I was determined to get a photo of it, so we acquired William’s camera and ended up heading for a stroll along the beach. The huge downer was that his camera was desperately lacking in battery power, so all the shots we came up with were pretty funny since no one knew what was going to show up until the photo had been taken, nor did the shutter go off when we wanted it to.

The one on the right shows me wincing in surprise as Joel suddenly sat down when the flash went off; and the bottom left, according to Michael, looks like an album cover. I’ll salute to that.

I’ve included a couple of pics from tournament – my warpaint from our last game, luge lifts; and Concert Band National/North Island Festival – our school got 6 straight gold awards! And dammit, the far bottom right picture ended up being the wrong one… in my haste I mis-compiled it… it was meant to be a far, far funnier one. Oops.

“Hey guys… Asians share their food…”

The ride down to Rotorua from Auckland was reasonably easy; I’d slipped in and out of unconsciousness listening to my ipod whilst thinking “wait… I never heard the end of that song…”, but the one upside to having been tardy to school was that I landed the front passenger’s seat in the second of the two minivans that we’d taken down.

Dinner, however, was a different story. Much to my surprise and horror, we rocked up to a place called… New Zealand Gourmet Food or something – which turned out to be a Chinese restaurant promoting veal – with a couple of taxidermised deer around the place for decoration! Ordering food was quite a fiasco. For once I felt such an asian, and I had to explain to everyone that, no, they shouldn’t order a dish each because in asian restaurants the portions are designed to be shared – “that’s why the thing in the middle of the table that you guys keep playing with spins, you know”, haha. Mind you, the funny thing about dinner was that it turned out to be the most Chinese food I’d ever eaten, since we ordered mostly “safe” food, like (way too much) fried rice, and chicken dishes.

Highlight of the day so far: we had to push-start the van after dinner!

Frozen sweets and pains

Anyone unfortunate enough to have been within my vicinity for the past week will have undoubtedly heard of the endless pain on the right side of my mouth caused by two wisdom teeth growing simultaneously.

I’m sure majority thought I was just being a hypochondriac with all my bitching about it – but no longer! I finally managed to get a dentist’s appointment for about an hour ago, and immediately the dentist said I had to have the top one pulled out – right then and there. Needless to say I was mortified – I hadn’t had a tooth pulled out in over a decade and the last time I was sitting in the same seat a couple of months ago I’d had some fillings put in. My memory immediately flicked back to the pain and discomfort… if fillings hurt so much, how bad is getting a tooth pulled out going to be?! It turns out that getting numbing injections took a lot longer and hurt a lot more than getting the tooth itself taken out. I asked to keep it – but they didn’t even rinse it for me! At the moment, I’m just afraid of the numbness wearing off, since I could see some fleshy bits attached to the tooth, urgh. Sorry if the photo’s a bit gruesome, couldn’t help it!

The upside of it all is that Mum and I drove straight to the ice cream factory store and bought 4x frozen yoghurts and 2x mango sorbet tubs all for the cheap price of $10! The looney downside is that I can’t have hot food for a week; have to keep biting on this fucking gauze that’s really pissing me off right now to stop the bleeding; have to keep taking antibiotics; aaaaaand… I can’t drink my pains away either, bugger! Mind you, that’s proably better for my health and eftpos card in the long-run, but I’m going to see Handsome Furs tonight and was hoping to have a beer or too, grrr.

On the strand of music, I photographed the Popstrangers gig on Saturday night, so eveeentuuually the pics will be up. Also, the Stage Band has a gig at the Howick Club tonight; I’m not sure what the occasion is but I guess I’ll find out in about an hour. And the best news? Concert Band won KBB!

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